Welcome back: Upside down cake returns to the 'in' list

Associated Press

Published Thursday, July 10, 2003

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Pineapple upside-down cake is making a comeback. Whether it's the return of the Hawaiian shirt, the season's dressy-casual choice for men, or simply a case of young cooks discovering one of their grandparents' favorite desserts, this tropical classic is in.

In Southern homes, pineapple upside-down cake was usually served at Thanksgiving or Christmas.Why?Because the pineapple was the symbol of hospitality in the South.

Southerners roll out the carpet for grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors during the holidays, and pineapple upside-down cake connoted Southern graciousness. Elsewhere, pineapple upside-down cake showed up any time of the year.

The pretty cake, sometimes called a "skillet cake," is also a favorite with kids. An elementary-school cafeteria manager once told me that school cooks for years relied on generous servings of pineapple upside-down cake to redeem their "worst" lunch days. She said kids love maraschino cherries.

The earliest pineapple upside-down cake recipes showed up in cookbooks in the mid-1920s, but the history of commercial pineapples goes back a few more years.

The pineapple, a tropical fruit native to the Americas, was first discovered by Christopher Columbus on the island of Guadeloupe in 1493. According to "The Dictionary of American Food and Drink" by John F. Mariani, the luscious-tasting fruit was widely dispersed throughout Asia's tropics by the late 1500s.

The fruit was introduced to Hawaii by Capt. James Cook in 1790, but it was not commercially cultivated there at first because of the difficulty of shipping between the islands and the United States mainland. In the 1880s, steamship transportation enabled widespread pineapple cultivation, and Hawaiian growers expanded their pineapple acreage.

In 1899, an entrepreneurial Harvard graduate, James Dole, went to Hawaii to make his fortune. Within a short time, he was growing and canning pineapples, and in 1903, with the help of an inventive engineer in his employ, he developed a machine that could peel, core and turn out a hundred whole pineapple cylinders a minute. By 1921, Dole Food Co. had established the fruit as the largest crop in those islands.

"The American Century Cookbook" by Jean Anderson suggests that cookbooks published by the Dole company and Gold Medal Flour in 1925 and 1926 helped popularize the recipe for pineapple upside-down cake. The timing makes sense, Anderson wrote, because perfectly cut canned pineapple rings had only recently become available across the United States.

While the ingredients for pineapple upside-down cake were somewhat of a luxury during the Depression, the attractive cake became a favorite with home cooks after World War II. Now, it's a hit with those cooks' grandchildren and great-grandchildren.